Speak Japanese? Love Japanese food? So does Takumo Ono. Having lived abroad for more than half her life, she feels connected with her culture, people and food. Here she celebrates the best of two worlds, living in Seattle and taking occasional trips to Japan to visit with family, indulge in great Japanese food and enjoy its hot springs.

Mari Yonehara

The news of the death of Boris Yeltsin reminded me of Mari Yonehara, a Japanese-Russian simultaneous interpreter and an award-winning writer, who passed away last May due to ovarian cancer. She was foremost among all the Japanese-Russian simultaneous interpreters that Japan could offer and was the designated interpreter for both Yeltin and Gorbachev, who is rumored to have praised her as the most powerful Russian user in the world. A collection of her personal accounts as an avid book reader (she read about 100 books a month) as well as her monthly book reviews published in Bungei-Shunju over several years were published as Uchinomesareruyouna Sugoihon after her death. If you can read Japanese, you can just type her name in kanji in Google and find numerous websites that praised her work and personality. Her books, essays and reviews were always witty, insightful and fun to read and never failed to impress me with her enormous knowledge in so many different topics such as history, literature, arts, religion, geography and the political landscape of not only Russia but also other countries of all sizes.

So I totally agreed with her when she mentioned that it is a pity for non-Japanese readers to be given such a limited selection of Japanese books in English. “No Japanese book can be considered for international awards unless it is translated into English.”

I wondered if Natsuo Kirino’s “Grotesque” and “Out” were considered worthy of translation, why not translate works by great storytellers such as Mari Yonehara and Kaoru Takamura or essays by an insightful critic of Japanese society and culture, Minako Saito (I don’t even like Haruki Murakami but loved her slashing his “Kafka on the Shore.”)? Minako Saito’s Mono-Wa-Iiyo, a collection and critique of gender descriminating comments publicly made by people in power including former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, would probably be a good eye-opener to fans of Koizumi or to his buddy, George Bush. A friend of mine, Bruce Rutledge of Chin Music, a publishing company in Seattle, answered my question.:

One reason is a couple of years ago several high-flying agents from New York came to Japan and signed up a bunch of the more popular writers. This was because Haruki Murakami was becoming a big hit, and so they thought that they should go find the “next big writer” from Japan. What happens is writers are signed based on the number of books they sell or on the edginess of their content, not necessarily on the quality of their books, since most (if not all) of these agents do not speak or read Japanese. That’s one of the reasons I formed Chin Music: To catch the good books that fall through the cracks when big publishing houses stress marketing over quality. Kirino kind of reminds me of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. I don’t find him to be a very compelling or interesting writer, but he got a lot of attention for that book because it was so gross. I never read it, however, as it didn’t appeal to me on any level and there are too many good books out there to choose from.